Table Of Content

WORDS AND WORLDS This page intentionally left blank WORDS AND A LEXICON WORLDS FOR DARK TIMES EDITED BY VEENA DAS AND DIDIER FASSIN duke university press · D urham and London · 2 021 © 2021 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Cover designed by Aimee C. Harrison Text designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Das, Veena, editor. | Fassin, Didier, editor. Title: Words and worlds : a lexicon for dark times / edited by Veena Das and Didier Fassin. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020041472 (print) lccn 2020041473 (ebook) isbn 9781478013259 (hardcover) isbn 9781478014164 (paperback) isbn 9781478021476 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Language and languages— Political aspects. | Words, New— Political aspects. | Sociolinguistics. | Language and culture. Classification: lcc p119.3.w57 2021 (print) | lcc p119.3 (ebook) | ddc 306.44— dc23 lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020041472 lc ebook rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020041473 Cover art: Joan Miró, Bleu II, 1961. Oil on canvas, 270 × 355 cm. © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York / AdAGp, Paris 2021. CONTENTS vii Acknowl edgments 1 INTRODUCTION: FROM WORDS TO WORLDS didier fAssin And veenA dAs 19 1. KNOWLEDGE · veenA dAs 39 2. DEMOCRACY · jAn- werner m�ller 61 3. AUTHORITY · bAnu bArGu 83 4. BELONGING · peter Geschiere 103 5. TOLERATION · udAy s. mehtA 123 6. POWER · Alex de wAAl 143 7. WAR · julietA lemAitre 166 8. REVOLUTION · behrooz GhAmAri- tAbrizi 185 9. CORRUPTION · cAroline humphrey 205 10. OPENNESS · todd sAnders And elizAbeth f. sAnders 225 11. RESILIENCE · jonAthAn puGh 243 12. IN EQUALITY · rAvi kAnbur 261 13. CRISIS · didier fAssin 277 References 299 Contributors 303 Index This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWL EDGMENTS The essays that compose the pre sent volume were prepared for and dis- cussed at a workshop held with the contribution of the Nomis Founda- tion at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princet on. We are thankful to its School of Social Science as well as to the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University for their administrative support. We especially express our gratitude to Donne Petito for her efficacious assistance, to Laura McCune for her gracious organi zation of the event, and to Munirah Bishop for her scrupulous copyediting of the manuscript. We are grate- ful to the two anonymous reviewers solicited by Duke University Press for their astute comments and to Ken Wissoker for his critical support. This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION FROM WORDS TO WORLDS DIDIER FASSIN AND VEENA DAS The idea of this intellectual enterprise came out of a conversation in the gloomy context of the spring of 2017. As we were evoking our perplexity and dismay with re spect to the ongoing po liti cal crisis in the United States, we realized that we had both commented on it in earlier public interventions using the figure of the return of the “grotesque” in politics (Das 2017; Fassin 2017). Like many others, we had been deeply troubled by the election of the new president, against the background of the rise of populist, national- ist, and xenophobic parties in Eu rope and beyond, but we were in addition disappointed with most of the hastily elaborated and often contradictory analyses made of it, whether in terms of discontent with globalization, racist backlash, cultural war, identity politics, economic protectionism, nationalism, or fascism. Our parallel discussions of the grotesque, based on both Michel Foucault’s ([1999] 2003: 11) reading of it as “the fact that, by virtue of their status, a discourse or an individual can have effects of power that their intrinsic qualities should disqualify them from having,” and on Alfred Jarry’s ([1894] 2003) disruptive character Ubu, tried to unsettle our habitual understanding of politics in a time when the ridicul ous and the odious were si mul ta neously legitimized as forms of governing through the person of the sovereign, to whom they paradoxically gave more power. But rather than formulating a definitive interpretation, which we did not have anyway, we used this troubling figure as a pretext to question the con- temporary moment in a dif fer ent way and destabilize the categories that we use to contemplate the world. As our conversation went on over several weeks, we thought that there might be some merit in extending and deep- ening our reflection so as to avoid the dual prob lem of Eurocentrism, since the debate tended to be exclusively focused on the West, and presentism,